(Happily Ever) After

It’s here at last.

Or rather, I am here at last. After fifty-six weeks of logging my meals, attending WW meetings and bagging up endless stacks of fat clothes for the AmVets, I have reached my goal. Effective immediately, my diet is over. I am now an "After".

And just in time. With eight weeks to go before the wedding, I’m sure to face little wisps of stress here and there (HA!), and so I’m glad that this piece of my life is finished. Yes, I’ll have to figure out how to keep the scale at a standstill as I prepare for a monumental (positive!) stressor, complete with annoying details, long to-do lists, alterations to plans, alterations to clothing, and alterations to guest lists that simply will not sit still. No biggie, though. In my new, slim, maintenance-mode body, this will be a…what? Piece of cake?

Well, okay, clearly not cake: not for the Fat Lady on Maintenance. It’s more like a big bowl of sugar-free jello. Hmm, somehow not as satisfying. Nor as convincing.

But I have my amazing fiancé to help me, along with his colossal parents, and my DS, who, by the way, is walking around the house announcing that he’s getting married, too. Well, why not? Aren’t we all marrying each other? It isn’t just Howard and I, after all. It’s all of us. On October 13, we create the legal component of what the last year has created already: a family. A unit, to have and to hold from that day forward.

But more I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-a-fairytale later. For now, I need to roll around some more about making my goal.

Somehow in the good luck that continues to follow me everywhere, I managed to produce an insurance pound. My goal weight is 147, and this morning, the scale pointed exactly at 146. The new digital scale did me one better, announcing 145.60. This is the end of my period, and I’m sure some of that is my body behaving in typical fashion, not only meeting the goal (finally!), but doing so with an extra little slammer at the end. I don’t expect to keep the insurance pound, and frankly, I don’t mind. I’m at goal. I made it.

This morning at WW, the meeting was titled, “Talk about what works, laugh about what doesn’t.” So please humor me a little retrospective.

I have learned that while I consider myself to be a thin person, that the Fat Lady lives on. The Big Broad lies just on the other side of my junior-sized wardrobe, sprawled across a two-person lounge chair, her stomach grumbling, and demanding a return to the Good Old Days. I have bested her, but she’s crafty and smart and it will be a long time before my habits hold the majority in my House of Commons. Maybe someday I’ll find a way to make peace with her, but for now it’s all out war, and she’s the mouthy, cantankerous rival who gets the last word in everything. Luckily for me, she no longer gets the last bite.

I have learned that eating a little bit of the forbidden foods yields disaster. We had a substitute leader this morning that nailed the way I feel about red-light treats. She said, “I can’t have one if there is more. If I do, everything that’s left becomes mine.” Amen.

It could be that some day I can go to a cocktail party and have ‘just a little bit’ of things, or I can weave treats into my program and not see them show up immediately on the scales. But I don’t think so. My fatness was not a temporary insanity. It is symptom of something long-term and deeply rooted in the crevices of my soul. I have problems with food, and when I am in need, it is my comfort and my foil. I have to shun red-light foods as an alcoholic shuns drink, and reap rewards and celebrations in other ways.

I don’t know what those rewards will be, or how it will change my life. I do know it will make me stand out forever. But I’d rather be a freak who fits into her junior clothes than an overweight, unhappy person who can eat whatever is put in front of her. There is no middle ground for me, no compromise. I eat as I exercise as I work, and as I live—head on. I’ve learned that when I forget that fact, I am reminded at once with tighter clothes and a heavy stomach.

I gain or lose weight in direct proportion to what I eat. I always have. At one point, when DS was 2, I was exercising an hour a day and burning 800 calories on the elliptical, and my weight remained stubbornly at 213. I didn’t get it: had birth and motherhood changed my metabolism so much that I couldn't lose anything? Was the ongoing breastfeeding standing in the way of normal clothes and healthy living?

I learned the hard way that it wasn’t any of those things—it was just me, eating to be fat. When I went back to work and had to give up my daytime gym trips, I gained 15 pounds in a month. Direct proportion. I know it. I accept it. I will use it to my advantage. Nothing bad in my mouth means nothing bad at the scale.

So, okay, there was no laughing here about what doesn’t work. I’m not sure that I’m ready for that. I’m a little post-traumatic stress right now, where I worry that even the proximity of fatty foods will make me gain. I hold on to my goal weight in these first hours, and it feels as precious and fragile as I do. Laughter comes later, at my first ‘thiniversary’, maybe, or in shared war stories with others on the journey.

I can see the whole trail now; all its hills and curves, every rut, and all the tears that muddied the path. I clutch this imaginary trophy tighter than any tangible reward I’ve ever earned. Because I did this. Me. My sweat and my discipline brought me here. They’ll keep me here, too, every moment and every day, one meal at a time.

I’m so glad this happened before the wedding. It exhilarates me to know that I’m beginning this new life completely removed from that old person. I can shed all the baggage of that woman, and leave it behind in the pounds that are no longer. It’s just one more thing I can pin to this event, one more way that this becomes a pinnacle of my life, and a point of unmatched happiness.

Now that I’m here, at fighting weight, it’s time to start shedding the rest of the unwanted saddle bags in my life. It’s time to purge, and to rid my house of all things bad and belligerent from Those Years. It’s a clearance, and Everything Must Go! Everything will go, too, you’ll see. I know I can do it, now. If I can yank these pounds off of me, then the rest will be easy.

Stay tuned. It’s going to get interesting.

A th S(inging at Last)

Follow the Leader

I need no further proof that I am still the Fat Lady.

I might walk around in size 3 junior jeans (if a little stiffly), but I fight the cravings of a mad woman every single day. I see candy and I want it. I smell peanut butter and I tremble. If the guy in front of me brings in donuts one more time this week, I may go postal. I don’t even really care for donuts, but I am prey to any food that is free, or fatty, or tastes like comfort. I am not okay to do this on my own, and I am not healed. This broad is just never, never going to sing and set me free.

A couple of years ago, I had a personal trainer build a diet/exercise program for me. He talked at length about retraining my taste buds to crave healthy foods and shun empty calories. And, to a certain extent, I have done that. I was moaning so hard over the tomatoes we got from the farm this week that Howard had to excuse himself from the kitchen. Last night we had organic corn on the cob and I nearly wept with joy at how good it tasted. I didn’t even use any butter-just a little bit of butter buds (some scary, preservative-filled, butter-like powder) and salt, but wow. Yummy, yummy stuff.

It works on the other side, too. I see sandwiches piled with fatty meats and cheese and I sniff in disapproval. I walk right by the impulse-buy brownies and Nutri-Grain bars in the cafeteria. When I come home from work and I’ve missed my afternoon snack, I go immediately for the nonfat yogurt or mini-popcorn. It doesn’t even occur to me to hunt for something evil. It helps, of course, that there isn’t anything like that in the house. Even DS’s Ritz crackers are so oil-laden that I can’t even smell them without my stomach turning. I have changed my habits. But even so, there is as part of me—a big, slathering, eat-until-I-faint part, that wants everything she sees. It has no bearing on my hunger level, the nutrition content, or what the scale read that morning. It is all about availability and convenience. And need: panting, sweating, need.

I’m at my worst when I’m alone. That’s what’s so frightening about Howard’s job, and the fact that he can disappear for weeks at a time. When he’s with me, and we’re eating together, I have a support network that is also something of a gatekeeper. I couldn’t imagine eating something frothy and Off Program in front of him. I can’t even imagine discussing it. I hesitate to let these temptations seep out of my brain and on to my tongue. Talking about comfort food excites me as much as it disgusts me, and I worry that talking about them dilutes their danger. I might be wrong, and I might be cutting of an excellent source of dispelling the great allure around things I can’t eat anymore, but it’s too risky to try. So I don’t discuss it with Howard, and I don’t admit that I have a problem, and then suddenly I’m faced with cake remnants in the coffee room or some Red Riding Hood du jour brings in a bag of something that she doesn’t want in her house, and I suffer all day long.

So when Howard went out of town a few weeks ago, and I was left alone with my PMS, I slid off the wagon. Not much—juts a few goldfish crackers and an atomic fireball here and there. Plus, of course, way too much fat free Reddi-Whip on my jello. And then on my couscous. And then on my pickles. No, no, just kidding on that. But I went through most of a shaker of popcorn seasoning in 2 weeks, flavoring up the Near-Dairy topping so it tasted more like dessert. Or, in a few instances, dinner.

And it showed up almost immediately. I had been creeping downward, even holding on to 148 pounds for a couple of days. That’s a miracle, especially given that I was heading toward my period. But then the goldfish crackers swam in schools and then DS didn’t finish all of his M&Ms one night, and suddenly I was thinking up reasons to stop by Walgreen’s on my lunch break. Sure enough, by Thursday I was teetering at 151. There was water weight in there for sure, but there was some oil as well. I managed to come back around, and I wound up with just a small gain on Saturday. But still, the whole episode left me shaken.

Now I’m in the withdrawal phase, where I’ve stopped hunting for treats and now I’m just working my way past the urges. My body is all excited about the new surge of refined sugar and it wants more, more, more. I’m back to digging my nails into my palms and re-routing myself around the building to avoid the marshmallow pits. My life is suddenly a game of Goth CandyLand, where I’m navigating the Sugar Plum forest and the GumDrop swamp, but instead of smiling sweeties, there are smirking meanies, and even though my entrails bunch up when I falter, I still want everything I see that’s wrapped in foil or served on a stick. So when it came time to do this week’s goal, I went back to my empty plate and made a promise. This week, I would follow the program.

I’ve heard this comment for a year at WW: Follow the Program. There will be someone who will announce a great loss, and Maria the Spectacular will ask, “What did you do differently?” The answer is inevitably the same: I followed the program.

I admit that I’ve rolled my eyes (internally) when I’ve heard this. Well, of course it worked if you followed the program. And of course you’d have trouble if you didn’t. Write down what you eat. Concentrate on low-density foods. Drink water until you leak. Exercise, exercise, exercise. But this week, it was different. Maria, who has had her own toils with keeping her years-long maintenance intact, noted that she’d had a couple of rough weeks and then surged back with a huge loss. The catalyst? The program. I followed the program, she admitted. Well, if it works for the leader, then it woudn’t hurt to try.

I went home and opened my WW spreadsheet. I have a chart with my weekly weigh-in and a sheet with every day’s food intake, along with the calorie, POINT, and protein/cab/fat/fiber content. To my amazement, I hadn’t logged a single day’s intake in nearly 3 weeks. I had gotten lazy about it before that, noting that some days I was simply copying the whole of the previous day’s food and pasting it into today. If I eat the same things, I rationalized, and I know what those food values are, I really don’t need to log everything. I know how many POINTS are in my lunch salad, and Howard’s hummus, and a 3 oz serving of grilled turkey on a whole wheat wrap. I can keep track in my head. I’m fine.

Apparently not.

So I dug through my head and back-filled a couple of days. Voila. Not only was I no longer in weight loss mode (target =18-19 POINTS per day), but I had crept over into maintenance-plus. I was lucky that I hadn’t gained more than I had. I was still fitting in to everything, and I still looked the same, but I could feel my insides changing. I had allowed the enemy to breech the front lines. The encroachment was small, but significant. There was time to fix it, but no time to wonder if I should. Follow the Program. It had to help.

I’m down below 150 again, and while I’m edging toward my PMS, I have it under control. Maybe the slip up was a good thing. It was humbling for sure, and a good lesson to learn. It’s also been a time to think about a reasonable goal weight. Do I just need to stay in loss mode forever? It seems I can’t trust myself to ease into maintenance, even when there’s only 2 pounds left to go and I’m burning 2100 calories a week in exercise.

Maybe I’ll be en guard forever. Maybe the desire for sweets will never vanish. I might have to find a way to look at those cravings as a comfort-sort of viewing change as something predictable-it’s always here, it will always be, it’s easiest just to accept it. Rather than berate myself for wanting the bad things and then caving in, it would help if I acknowledged the pain that I feel, but remind myself that the discipline is much easier than the regret. Nobody ever got into trouble for following the program.

I am simply not a person who can have “a little bit” of something off-program. I can’t have cheat days. I can’t ease into normal. I can’t mold the program to fit my life. I have to shape it from inside me. I have to bend myself to fit the program, and I have to follow it exactly. There’s no suffering involved in that—I’ve done it for a year, and when I’ve suffered, it’s when I’ve strayed. Low-complexity carbs make me hungry. Broccoli does not. Pop-Tart remnants make me cranky. Apples never will. I thought I was far enough away from 251 to risk a little bit of fun. I am not. I will never be.

I can feel the change already. I’m sitting taller, I’m walking better, and last night, I pounded out 40 minutes of hard time on the StairMaster. I’m still resting my knees from the race, and I hope to get back outside once the blacktop stops bubbling, but for now I’m stuck on the stationery aerobic machines at the YMCA. I can do it. After all, even though I’m not burning as many calories, I’m getting a harder workout that’s strengthening my legs.

And I get to do a little lifting, which helps all over. I came home from a workout on Saturday and insisted to Howard that we get the weights in the house. I can run or log time on the elliptical pretty easily, and pretty much anywhere, but I have to have the weights at home. It’s a bit of an expense coming at a time when we have to give away all our money to caterers and florists, but it’s an important investment. I deserve to lose weight and keep it off. I will make it work: I just have follow the program.

A the B(ack on Track)

10k Gold

Well, I did it.

Last Sunday, at 8:32am, I crossed the 10k finish line. I clocked a pokey 10:08 pace, but I ran the whole thing at a steady cadence, I never stopped to walk or rest, and I passed more women than passed me. I wound up somewhere near the middle of the pack of nearly 1400 runners, and I finished 72^nd…in my age group. And no, I don’t know how many women were in my age group. Seventy-three? Nine hundred? Four? It remains a mystery.

I ran with Maria the Spectacular and her daughter, who brought along 2 friends from work. I moved away from them soon after the starting gun, in part out of nerves, and in part because I’m a lone runner. I enjoy my time alongside Howard when we go together, but for all purposes, I fly solo when on foot. I wanted to be alone with myself as I logged the miles and took in the scenery.

Choosing an all-woman race as a first-time event was smart: women chatted all through the race, talking to each other about parties, picnics, work, and, of course, their men. I saw very few hard core racers (certainly there were none at the back of the pack, where I started), and I didn’t get elbowed out of someone’s way or shoved off the path because I was clogging up the “lane”. A few non-racers crossed our paths, dodging through with their dog or darting around us on cycles, but for the most part, we had north Lincoln Park to ourselves. The sun was bright but mild, the lake was calm, and the humidity stayed out in the suburbs. It was pretty cool.

I resisted the urge to sprint off the line at the start, and again near the end. I couldn’t see the finish line until I was 100 feet from it, and so I dared not notch it up, not knowing whether it was 500 yards or 1.75 miles before I hit the Finish mat. God forbid I run 5.5 of a 6.2 mile race and then collapse a few feet before the end because I miscalculated the finish line and my own ability to run at full speed when I’d run most of the race like a normal person.

I had lots left in the tank when I stopped, and though I crashed when we got home, sleeping nearly 7 hours on Sunday afternoon and leaving Howard to fend for himself the day before he traveled (DS slept with me in solidarity), I was fine. I had a bit of soreness the next day, but since I’d been running 7-ish miles per workout for 2 or 3 weeks, this was a Sunday Morning Run, and not much else.

I’m glad I did it, but I’m not sure I’ll repeat the race experience. Running is one of a rare few things in my life where I’m not competitive. I don’t carry the timer with me anymore, I don’t try to run until I hurl, and I stop to walk if I get winded or the humidity suffocates my legs. It’s my pleasure, purely and easily and I alone own every sweaty, huffing moment of it. Somehow the idea of picking at my pace, or of running more hills or intervals for the sake of the sport just dogs me. I don’t want to do anything but run. Given how infrequently I can do something for its own sake, rather than as a gnawing crawl for the Championship of the Universe, I think it’s best to leave it alone.

Especially since I may have to give it up.

I’m so worried that it’s true, and that I’ll have to give this up when I’m still a fledgling. I’ve been having a burning sensation in the tops of my knees for the past couple of weeks, and sometimes it lasts for 2 days after my workout. I don’t feel it while I’m running, but the burning starts immediately after I stop and intensifies for a full day afterward. I keep to low-heeled shoes at work and I make sure my form is textbook, but the ache has persisted. I suspect I’ve done a bit of overtraining—it probably is too much to ask a newbie runner’s body to log 21 miles a week in only 3 sessions. But I love it, and I have to say, I’m pretty stressed about the idea of stopping. If it doesn’t abate soon, I may have to seek help, and all the running books say to stay away from doctors—their favorite advice to runners with knee pain is “Stop running.” Oh, and of course, “That’ll be $150, since this was not covered by your insurance.”

I took most of this week off, opting not to work out at all until Thursday, in hopes that the burning would go away. I went to the Y, deciding that maybe I could keep my fitness level up if I did 2 stationery workouts a week and reduced my running to 2 times (from 3 or 4). I mounted the elliptical and ran it as fast as I could for 30 minutes. I’d planned for 40, but the treadmills were Right There, and I just had to hop on. I haven’t been on a treadmill in months, and I wanted to see, just for a minute, how it would be.

Let me tell you, after criss-crossing the DuPage county Forest Preserve, running on a treadmill is like watching other people ride a roller coaster. You get some idea of the thrill, but it’s so unbearably monotonous that all you wind up getting is dizzy and bored. I made it a mile before I gave up. I hadn’t prepared to run and so was having some issues (details withheld for modesty’s sake), and eventually I had to step off. I wanted to go back today, but the burning has returned, quieter than usual, but then again, I only ran 1 mile instead of 7. I am going out tomorrow though. I’m taking my old shoes too, since now everything is suspect. Maybe it’s the miles. Maybe it’s the trail. MAYBE it’s the shoes, and the fact that this allegedly awesome running store didn’t watch me run when the sold me the shoes. And maybe, if I change enough things, the burning will go away and I can get back to running injury-free.

The Mommy Marathoner at work suggested that I don’t have enough musculature in my legs to support me, and so the work is falling to my joints—literally. I like this idea best, since it’s fixable, and fixable with more exercise (and exercise I’ve been meaning to add for months now). So my new plan is to run 2 days a week and do the Y 2 days (or 3). I’ll run for an hour outside, but on Y days, I’ll do 30 mins of zero-impact aerobics (YAWN!) and 30 minutes of weights. I’m a hard core lifter from way back and I know how to work my whole body in 30 minutes, especially at the beginning. Eventually I’ll have to alternate days and body parts, but for now I can beef up my legs and get back to the business of hoofing on the limestone.

In the mean time, I’m still hungry all the time, and it got way worse when Howard started traveling again last week. I started thinking about why my brain went so haywire as soon as Howard’s limo left the driveway. Eventually, I remembered an old news article that made a connection between some chemical in chocolate and some receptor in the brain that gets all fuzzy when you’re in love. I wanted chocolate because I missed my man. It helped to know that, intellectually, but I still had to leave through the shipping dock every night this week, to avoid the basket of goodies that a woman at work (a triathelete, I might add) now keeps at her desk.

I really hate skinny people sometimes.

Someone at WW said last week that the part of my brain craving bad foods is a part of my physiology, and will never go away. Hats and horns, my pain is chronic! It’s just like alcoholism-a disease, terrible and progressive, with no known cure. I’d get one of those ribbons to stick to my minivan, but I fear it would remind me of an Auntie Anne’s pretzel and make things worse. Oh, cinnamon sugar darling, come comfort me while I mourn my self-destructive gene pool….

Howard is home this week, and while I logged a record low 147.25 pounds on Monday, it was only because I slept all day and ate nothing and I knew it wouldn’t last. I’m still hovering in the 150 area, but I figure that adding resistance training will build muscle and encourage me to eat more protein. Maybe the Fat Lady will be so busy digesting branch chain amino acids that she won’t notice that I’m cocoa-deficient.

Fat chance. Hmmm. Maybe next week’s goal is to figure out how to turn that into a no-fat chance. I’ll think about it on my next run.

A the T(en K)

PS-Yeah, ok. It was pretty cool to run the race. I finished a 10k. Me, the ex-Fat Lady, who couldn’t slam the car door a year ago without taking an extra breath. I ran 6.2 miles without stopping, and sort of felt cheated that there wasn’t more to do. Maybe I’ll look up that ten-miler race in October….Stay tuned.